Introduction: Postconflict Peacebuilding and Democratization

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners have recently given increased attention to the intersection of two concepts: postconflict peacebuilding and democratization or, more broadly, governance. Several factors contribute to this development. First, postconflict peacebuilding itself has become an important concept within international security. The field of peacekeeping, long concerned chiefly with reaching and maintaining durable peace agreements, now embraces the need to address a complex range of challenges in war-torn societies: preventing future armed conflict, redressing past human rights abuses, building effective state institutions, (re)creating a social fabric, and fostering a healthy civil society. (1) Although some question its utility as a concept, peacebuilding has firmly entered the lexicon of peace and security studies. Second, good is increasingly seen as an important concept in postconflict reconstruction. During the 1990s, multilateral and bilateral development agencies brought into their philosophy and programs on economic development. Security specialists have followed that trend, embracing the link between good and durable peace. actors have added good to a postconflict agenda that has historically focused on ensuring immediate military security and regenerating the economy. Preventing future conflicts is not solely a matter of keeping those with guns from using them, but of establishing accountable, transparent, and participatory systems of authority. As United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator Mark Malloch Brown states in his article Democratic Governance: Toward a Framework for Sustainable Peace, is vital not just for ensuring sustainable development, but also for sustaining peace within societies. Third, sound governance, at least in its political dimension, is increasingly identified with some form of democracy. (2) Although controversy surrounds definitions, in this special issue refers to the exercise of political, economic, and social authority in a society. (3) Democracy, used in these articles to mean free and fair electoral competition with minimal civil rights guarantees, is now widely viewed as the only acceptable form of national-level political governance. (4) As Gregory H. Fox demonstrates in his article International Law and the Entitlement to Democracy After War, minimal elements of democracy are part of international legal obligations, and norms of democracy permeate the UN system as well as regional intergovernmental organizations. European and U.S. democracy-promotion programs have grown tremendously in the past decade, and democratic governance now receives most of the UNDP's core funding, as its administrator notes in this issue. assistance, especially to countries experiencing some sort of political or military transition, virtually requires the instauration of electoral democracy, even if authoritarian practices and curbs on freedoms persist, and perhaps half of the world's population lives in political systems that are not meaningfully democratic. Indeed, many such systems are deemed legitimate by the populations living within them. The third wave has its limitations. (5) However, the increasing convergence in practice of these two sub-fields--peacebuilding and democratization--has only recently been accompanied by concentrated attempts by the scholars and practitioners of each to address one another. The postconflict peacebuilding community and the democratization communities have enjoyed remarkably little dialogue. The recent peacebuilding literature, for instance, has not engaged some of the difficult questions posed by research on democratization and governance. Much of that research emphasizes structural preconditions for statehood and democracy that fall beyond the short-term control of policymakers. More importantly, scholars and policymakers increasingly recognize that democratization, especially untimely elections, have sometimes sparked wars and genocide. …